Search form

Stories Worth Telling

Joint Initiative of Georgetown University Center for Social Impact Communication and the Meyer Foundation

Storytelling is an essential component of nonprofit communications, but very few organizations have a firm grasp of what good storytelling truly is and how it can be leveraged to improve outreach and fundraising. This is especially true among smaller organizations, which often lack the resources and staff to invest in developing the required processes and fostering in-house expertise.

With support from the Meyer Foundation, Georgetown University's Center for Social Impact Communication conducted best practice research on nonprofit storytelling and offered a series of workshops to train nonprofit leaders in developing more effective stories with greater impact. The culminating publication aims to fill the existing storytelling resource gap by providing examples of good, compelling stories that have had measurable outcomes for organizations, along with a step-by-step strategy for creating and sharing these stories—one that’s particularly geared toward smaller organizations.

The Data

Researchers from Georgetown University's Center for Social Impact Communication surveyed 81 nonprofits serving the Washington, DC region to find out more about how they think about, plan for and perceive the effectiveness of their current storytelling efforts. Learn more in the infographics below.

​

The Stories

Participants in the Stories Worth Telling workshop series were encouraged to bring back to their organizations tools, processes, and resources to create a storytelling culture within their organizations, and produce effective stories. We've gathered some of these stories in our story bank, and hope you share more stories with us. Everyone has a story worth telling, and here are yours.

Publication

Stories Worth Telling: A Guide to Strategic and Sustainable Nonprofit Storytelling—a comprehensive set of research and best practices designed to build storytelling capacity among small nonprofits—is now available. [Download]